No, it’s not an abortion rant. My topic is education in general and the weird phenomenon of “school choice” advocacy in particular. But the parallels between the two issues deserve exploration.

The school choice movement, broadly defined, proposes to improve public education — the state’s mandate to provide K-12 schooling to all comers — by introducing “market values” in the form of competition between schools (“public,” i.e. government-operated, and private) for the tax dollars allocated to that mandate.

The school choice movement breaks down into three camps: Charter schools supporters, voucher advocates and tax credit advocates.

Charter schools supporters want to students in the government-operated system, but propose additional, special public schools — schools with particular academic focuses or novel approaches to pedagogy — and an “open enrollment” scheme that allows students to choose Public Arts School #1 or Public Vo-Tech School #3 instead of just getting on the bus and attending the public schools designated for their neighborhoods.

Voucher and tax credit advocates propose to make private schools eligible for the tax dollars allocated to education. The voucher system entails allowing a parent to choose a private school and partially or wholly pay tuition at that school with a voucher that the school could then redeem from the state for tax dollars (presumably up to the per-student amount that the state spends on education). The tax credit system, more simply, just lets a parent deduct tuition costs from his or her income taxes.

At first blush, these proposals seem like improvements to the existing system. Competition, the theory goes, will force public schools to do a better job of educating kids, else their funding will disappear and go instead to the private schools (or, in the case of charter schools, other public ones) that out-perform them.

In reality, however, “school choice” is the worst of all possible worlds. It doesn’t end the state’s near-monopoly on education. In fact, it extends that monopoly into the private sector and infects all educational choices with the problems inherent to that monopoly.

One of the first firewalls put up by public education supporters against vouchers and tax credits has been prohibition against using them for schools operated by religious institutions or with religious items in their curricula. The reason that’s one of the first objections is that it’s one of the most obvious and reasonable. If the First Amendment’s establishment clause means anything, it means that the government doesn’t get to use your tax dollars for religious indoctrination.

Another obvious and reasonable firewall is the application of government anti-discrimination laws to schools accepting “government funds.” It matters not whether the Ku Klux Klan Academy does a fine job of teaching its students to read, write and do arithmetic — if they don’t accept students of color, they don’t get tax money.

The first firewalls will not be the last.

How long will it be before the “English Only” lobby demands a prohibition against the use of tax credits or vouchers for teaching in Spanish?

How long before the creationists insist that schools which don’t present “intelligent design” forfeit their ability to participate in the program — and how long before the science community insists on barring schools that do?

Admissions, curriculum, hiring practices, firing practices — over time, schools which accept vouchers or for which tax credits are allowed will be pulled into the government standards that have made public education a failure. By the time it’s over, those private schools will effectively be public schools. The only difference will be that now students will have nowhere else to go.

The school choice advocate is like a woman who has discovered, a couple of months into her pregnancy, that her child has Down Syndrome. Suppose that woman decides not to get an abortion, but also refuses to acknowledge that she’s going to give birth to a developmentally disabled child? Oh, but she’s got a miracle cure — if she can just choose to deliver the baby at a different hospital, why, that will change everything!

Except that it won’t change anything. The problem isn’t the OB-GYN or the quality of the hospital’s neo-natal intensive care unit. The problem is that the baby has Down Syndrome, and no matter which OB-GYN she consults or which hospital she chooses, she’s going to bring the problem with her.

This hypothetical woman and the real-life school choice advocate are making the same mistake. The result — developmentally crippled children — is the same, too.

The problem isn’t lack of competition within the government education mandate. The problem is the government education mandate. The only solution is separation of school and state. And while we’re at it, how about separation of everything else and state, too?

The only unambiguously free market step with respect to education is repeal of compulsory attendance laws. Such laws already give the government power to regulate private schools and harass home schoolers, through the simple mechanism of denying that these satisfy the compulsory attendance requirement. Repeal those and private schools will already be able to do a better job by being freed of the regulatory requirement of being substantively equal to government schools (what a horrible thought!).

I'm reading Illich's "Deschooling Society" right now. I have to say, it's really been an eye opener on a number of issues. I agree with nearly all of his assessments, though I have to say I disagree with nearly all of his proposed solutions to the problems as they invariably involve a sentence like "we must pass legislation which makes it…". The only sensible choice is not to pass more legislation but to get rid of what's already there.

The problem with public schooling isn't that the teachers unions have too much power, it's that the teachers themselves (not the union) have too little power. Teachers want to teach; they're certainly not in it for the money. They're held back by bloated and micromanaging bureaucracies and atrocities like No Child Left Behind. Charter Schools and vouchers are just a scam so rich parents can send their kids to fancy schools while the poor kids languish at schools that keep seeing their budgets cut resulting in expanding class size, outdated materials and technology, and decaying and even unhealthy facilities. Consider that if a private school charges $12,000 but the public school budget is $7000 per student, a voucher system would still require the parents to pony up $5000- Only the elite can afford that. Charter school systems should be rejected as vulgar privatization, with all the disaster of neoliberalism in Eastern Europe. Teachers and parents would have even LESS say in them. Yet elitist politicians and liberals can't bring themselves to suggest that teachers actually have control in their schools- and I doubt many people have even conceived of giving any say at all to the students, who should be in charge of their own learning; but of course, the purpose of schools is not for students to learn, but for students to be educated.

What I find interesting, and a bit frustrating, about Ivan Illich is that while he did a great job of critiquing modern institutions (educational, medical, etc.) and exposing their monopolizing and counterproductive nature, he never applied his reasoning to institutions of governing, i.e. nation-states. I'd like to think that his proposed solutions would have been more sensical, and more conducive of convivial relations, if he would have done so.

I feel the same way. I have not yet read "Tools for Conviviality" though. It is on my reading list and I found an online copy of it that I'll peruse. In some spots in "Deschooling Society" he did make mention of the state being a problem. Rather than propose an alternative, he did allude to the possibility of undermining the state as a whole by undermining its chief tool – compulsory education. There was a lot of nuance to it, but I did get that out of it. I think possibly his position with the church (at the time he was writing these) kept him from advocating an all-out abandonment of state.

I agree fully with the sentiment of your post, but I just wanted to point out in favor of the tax credit idea that if anything, the proponents of tax credits can legitimately respond to the separation-of-church-and-state teacher's unions that a school tax credit could not be credibly labeled as unconstitutional government establishment of religion since the government is simply refraining from redistributing taxpayer monies from working stiffs to teacher's unions.

That might be true — so long as the credit isn't "refundable" in excess of taxes paid. Most proposals I've seen are in fact "refundable," i.e. if the tax credit is up to $2,000 and you take it, and your tax bill only came to $1,000 before the credit, the government sends you $1,000 of someone else's money.
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This article just proves why Libertarians will never get their way, in any sense. It's not that we are wrong, its that we fail to see improvements as a process. Case in point: his total disapproval of the voucher or charter system. How bout we take what we can get and work from there? Is that really so hard?

I think school vouchers & tax credits for private schools are as unlibertarian as "public schools," because "private" educators are still funded by taxation-robbery. What do we call the use of tax-robbed money for some "private" cronies allying with the state? Corporate welfare